Answers from the New Emperor of Scent

We've heard back from Thomas Prevenslik. Here is what he had to say.

FN: When and why did you start thinking about quantum electrodynamics (QED) and olfactory receptors?

TP: Luca Turin contacted me about 4 months ago with some questions about QED radiation.

FN: Have you ever smelled deuterated benzaldehydes? Were they what you expected?

TP: No, I know very little about smell.

FN: How many languages do you speak or read?

TP: English, but some Chinese.

FN: Would you agree that Or Black by Pascal Morabito is “an extreme fougère, smoky, dark, bitter, resinous-green, like triple-distilled Earl Grey, a step beyond even Rive Gauche pour Homme in its saturnine glory”?

TP: Have no idea.

FN: How convincing did you find the 2007 Brookes et al., paper on olfactory receptor activation by inelastic electron tunneling? Did it motivate your new thinking on QED and smell?

TP: Marshal Stoneham sent me the paper a few weeks ago. Like all tunneling phenomenon, I thought it was difficult to understand and concluded with handwaving. But this has been going on since Marcus. Very few people understand the Marcus theory, but it is accepted. The basic problem here is that a source of EM energy is not available to produce the shape or vibration signal from the odorant molecule - so since Marcus, tunneling is thought to explain electron transfer. Perhaps, QED theory will change that.

In fact, some one other than Turin knowing that I have proposed that nanoparticles (NPs) emit ioionizing radiation in cancer suggested that perhaps odor molecules are also emitting EM radiation. A NP is like and odorant molecule in that both are similar to NPs, a necessary condition in the QED theory.

In tribochemistry, QED theory argues electrons and photons are produced by rubbing NPs off the surfaces. The residual kT energy that the atoms had while a part of a macroscopic body is not allowed by QM, so QM requires the NPs to get rid of the kT energy by EM emission.

With regard to smell, my results to date suggest that IR and VCD emission is likely emitted from the odorant molecules, again after acquiring the kT energy in colliding with the nose surface. But ionizing radiation is not likely produced as in tribochemistry. Nevertheless, if the G-receptors can detect the IR and VCD emission to produce a signal to the brain,then the QED mechanism will certainly challenge both shape and vibration theories.

Some experimental test to demonstrate that non-ionizing IR and VCR radiaton cause the odors we smell would prove the QED theory. If you know of any experimental groups that can produce odor from IR/VCD radiation, let me know. I am a retired American now in China and living in Hong Kong, China, and Berlin.

FN: Who would you rather have formulate your personal cologne: Annick Ménardo, Bertrand Duchaufour, Yohji Yamamoto, or Jean-Claude Ellena?

TP: I use my own personal smell.

FN: Have you found it difficult to publish your new vibrational theory of olfaction in peer-reviewed scientific journals? Do you think there is an effort to silence vibration theorists?

TP: I have not tried to publish, yet. But would expect opposition from both shape and vibration theorists as well. There is always an attempt to silence new scientific theories. If you look at my home page, you will see that I have challenged almost every theory in physics with the QED theory, e.g., the QED theory shows the Hubble redshift is caused by cosmic NP dust, and therefore the Universe is not expanding. So, you see I have a enemies in astronomy as well.

FN: Is 1981 Château Lamothe Despujols really all it’s cracked up to be? What’s your favorite Sauternes?

TP: Have no idea.

FN: Has a tall, socially awkward guy been following you around taking notes? If not, why not?

TP: Have no idea.

Face to Face with Perfume: Dr. Theresa L. White

Theresa White is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. One of her research interests is sensory psychology. At the recent AChemS smell and taste conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, she gave a poster called “Perfume Masculinity/Femininity Affects Face Gender Judgments.” We caught up with her afterwards and talked to her about the study.

FN: Tell us about this work.

White: We thought that in a social situation where many cues were ambiguous, people would be apt to use olfactory information to disambiguate the situation. So we ran a number of pilot studies. The first one we ran was to see if we could find odors that were marketed as masculine or feminine perfumes and that people did, in fact, perceive as masculine or feminine. We found two: one was Caesars Man and the other was Shania by Stetson.

The other thing we did was to go through a lot of pictures of faces that had been cropped so you couldn’t see the hair, you couldn’t see the mouth, and that were emotionally neutral. We used ones Steven Nosek published in a paper[*] in 2002.

FN: So these were a previously used set of faces?

White: Yes. He sent us twelve: three African American females, three African-American males, three Caucasian females, three Caucasian males. We tested people with that set and found the pictures they were most reliably able to say were male or female. We picked one from each category so that we had four.

Then we took all twelve photos and morphed across sex but not across race. So, one African-American male was morphed with three African-American females, so that every possible combination was morphed. 

I don’t know how much you know about morphing but you can go to a wide number of steps. We went to 100 steps, took the middle 40 to 60, and had people look at those and say whether they were male or female. Then, from the most ambiguous ones, we selected two African-American and two Caucasian. So altogether we had four ambiguous and four distinctive faces.

We divided people into two groups—nine in each group—and they either smelled the masculine perfume or they smelled the feminine perfume while they looked at the faces. They saw each face twice in a random order and their job was simply to say if it was male or female. We anticipated that ambiguous faces would be more likely to be seen as male or female depending on the perfume the person was smelling 

FN: So the perfume would put a spin on their interpretation of an ambiguous face?

White: That’s exactly what we were hoping to see. . . . We didn’t see it. [laughs] 

FN: That’s weird.

White: What we did see was that if you wanted to call that ambiguous face something that was not the perfume that you were smelling it took you longer. So if you were to label a face with a gender that was inconsistent with the perfume you were smelling, it would be slower for you. 

Dr. Theresa L. White

FN: So I’m looking at this ambiguous face and I’m going to say it’s female, but if I’m smelling a masculine fragrance it takes me longer to say so.

White: You got it.

FN: The incongruence between the gender of the fragrance and my bet about the gender of the face slows me down.

White: Right. What we think is going on is some sort of priming effect from the odor. There are a couple of things that could improve this study. We let people look at the face as long as they wanted; they could take their time, “it might be male, it might be female, I’m not really sure”. That’s kind of a problem. I’d like to push people so they have a shorter amount of time to see the face and make their decision.

FN: So flash it at them and then force them to make a call.

White: Right. And another thing: with the distinctive stimuli people were very good; there were almost no mistakes. The mistakes they were made were in the direction of the perfume that they were smelling. So if you were smelling a female perfume and looking at a male face, you’d error by calling it a woman. There were hardly any mistakes at all with distinctive faces, but the ones there we found were in the right direction. So that gives me a hint that if I speed things up, I could induce more errors on the distinctive faces and on the ambiguous faces to the point were I’d get more of an effect.

The other thing I’d really like to do is run the study as a within-subjects experiment because the “good subject tendency” could be at work. In other words, if people know they’re smelling a masculine perfume, they may answer “male” to those stimuli that they’re not sure about because they can guess that’s what the experimenter wants them to do. 

FN: So the way you actually ran it, a person only smelled one perfume but looked at many faces?

White: Right.

FN: And you’d like to run each fragrance against every type of face, all scrambled.

White: That would be my ideal way to do it.

FN: So when you had people rate the gender of the perfumes . . .

White: We did that afterwards.

FN: . . . that was done by the people in the experiment but afterwards. And were those pretty clear results?

White: It was clear that the perfumes we thought were masculine they thought were masculine; the ones we thought were feminine, they thought were feminine.

FN: So you basically asked people “how masculine is this perfume” or “how feminine is this perfume”, using rating scales?

White: You got it.

FN: And people can do that with no problem?

White: No problem.

FN: Some people claim that the gender of perfume is all a function of marketing.

White: Well, there may be an element of that, an element of learning what constitutes male scent and what constitutes female scent within a specific culture. People carry around culture-specific schema if you will, ideas of what a man smells like, what a woman smells like. And so these perfumes fit this ideal schema better for our culture. 

FN: Do you think these cultural schema are purely arbitrary? Could there be a culture where light florals are masculine and heavy woody notes are feminine?

White: I suppose it’s possible. I don’t know of any. [laughs] 

FN: Are there any biological boundaries to what’s possible in the olfactory assignment of gender?

White: You know, that’s outside the realm of any data.

FN: Can you speculate?

White: Like I said, I don’t know of any culture where light florals are masculine.

FN: Come back to the facial stimuli. What is it that makes a face masculine and easy to identify? Are there facial features that people use?

White: Yes, there are definitely features that make a face look more masculine or feminine: brow size, nose size, eye orientation, and puffiness of cheeks, for example.

FN: There are guys who look very feminine and women who look very masculine and yet we don’t deny that are males and females.

White: No. But there are times when you’re in a social situation where you just don’t know. So you look for additional information such as what this person is wearing. If fragrance is something they’re wearing, it’s something you can use to disambiguate an unusual situation.

FN: Let’s talk about possible applications of your work. What if a woman has a very feminine look, roundy eyes and everything you associate with feminine appearance; would it be a good idea or a bad idea for her to wear a gender-ambiguous scent?

White: I think odors help to disambiguate a situation where our more “reliable” sense—vision—is not reliable. At the sensory integration seminar here at AChemS, there was a fellow talking about how we weight sensory information: we weight highly reliable senses more heavily than the more variable senses, and olfaction is an incredibly variable sense. So I really believe we give a lot more credence to what our eyes say than what our nose says most of the time. But in situation where the eyes aren’t doing it for you, you’re going to make use of any other information to help clear things up. 

FN: So a smell could put you over the edge in an ambiguous situation?

White: Yes.

FN: Has anybody done anything with ambiguous voices?

White: Nope.

FN: That would be cool, wouldn’t it?

White: Yup. That would be way cool.

FN: Who was looking at the pictures in your study? Men and women?

White: Only men.

FN: Why only men?

White: Because preferences for masculinity of faces varies with the menstrual cycle and I wanted a less noisy data set. I would have felt obligated to control for phase of menstrual cycle and other factors if I’d used women, and that would have complicated the study considerably.

FN: So what’s the next step in this project?

White: I’m going to do it again as a within-subjects experiment with time limited exposure to the faces. But I have a number of different faces and I’ve morphed across emotions and that’s another direction I’m hoping to go with this. 

I bought Paul Ekman’s set of facial expressions and the ones I was trying to use were pleasantness and disgust because I though disgust was the most olfaction-related expression of emotion.

FN: I once got Paul Ekman to try to flare only one of his nostrils at a time. It drove him nuts for twenty minutes at a psychology faculty party.

White: [laughs]

FN: Thank you very much.

White: Thank you.

[*Nosek, B.A., Banaji, M.R., & Greenwald, A.G. (2002). Harvesting group attitudes and stereotypes from a demonstration website. Group Dynamics 6(1):101-115.]

Portrait of the Artist: Gayil Nalls

In New York recently I met Gayil Nalls, a multimedia artist who works with smell. She has a doctorate in the art and science of olfaction from the University of East London and more than two dozen solo exhibits to her credit. In World Sensorium, she asked every country in the world to identify its characteristic natural scent. She combined these into a fragrance in which each country’s scent is proportional to its fraction of the world’s population.

FN: How do you see yourself as an artist and how does smell fit into that picture?

Nalls: My artistic practice engages conceptual questions around the human body and the attributes of crowds, our evolving understanding of the senses, and our relationship to disappearing ecologies. Materials and their symbolism are also very important to my work, as are their alchemic potential. By the mid-eighties I wanted to reimagine and authentically represent the world in a distinct way. For this, one sense was more valuable than the others - the sense of smell. 

FN: Your major foray into smell is World Sensorium, a work that you refer to as a “social olfactory sculpture.” What I find especially appealing is how the concept connects people with place—the actual scents of real places. Tell us about this project.

Nalls: It wasn’t until December 28th, 1989, when I was filming at the Berlin Wall, that the inspiration for the sculptural structure to create the world scent became vivid, fully formed in my mind. There were probably a million people on both sides of the Wall when the guards finally dropped their guns and freedom just flowed like an undammed river. In an unprecedented expansion of consciousness and human mass, one person after the other was pulled onto the top of the wall. Messages passed through the nerves of hands and my body and brain simultaneously understood that the formula would be based on population because everyone counts in this world. We are creating the form. By the next morning I knew that I would engage the world in dialog.

World Sensorium is about natural scents that work as olfactory imprints and memory triggers for large numbers of people of cultures in every region of the world. The components come together in a world formula based on country population percentages to the global whole. It took ten years to complete the work.

The work premiered as a public art in Times Square 2000: The Global Celebration at the Crossroads of the World and was endorsed to the event by UNESCO. It rained down in microencapsulated paperworks with the confetti at midnight. 

FN: What makes it a “world olfactory social sculpture”? 

Nalls: Several things. Foremost, it’s the information system that defines the world scent’s formula - where everyone is counted, and then it is world participation in the dialogue conducted over five years that helped establish the constituent ingredients. 

World Sensorium is a social sculpture because it engages the world in a conversation about the sense of smell and about the concept of place and culture. The communication process is part of the form. The artwork links cultures in a unique and little understood way and makes the geographical experience of scent visible. 

The term “social sculpture” was coined by the German artist Joseph Beuys who I met during his exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1979, and whose Socratic conversation I attended at Cooper Union. For Beuys, social sculpture was part of an interdependent democratic and ecological process. 

Image on a microencapsulated sample of  World Sensorium fragrance.  © G. Nalls 2009

FN: Why the emphasis on natural smells?

Nalls: Our brains evolve in direct relationship to the molecules released in our environment. The botanical components of World Sensorium are from the most important plants, trees, flowers, herbs and grasses that co-evolved with the human brain. Over centuries these became highly integrated into cultural practices because the physiological and behavioral responses were beneficial and desirable. Their volatile odorates are encoded.

World Sensorium is about the interrelated nature of the human brain, odor, memory, the natural environment, culture and the perception of beauty. 

FN: Smell memory is a theme for many artists—how do you approach it?

Nalls: World Sensorium is about memory and how it equates to individual personality, societal culture and national identity. Without memory and this relationship to nature of place, we lose who we are. An early relationship with nature of place is a very real chemical relationship and without it we feel emptiness at the absence of something. It is felt in both the body and the mind: people have described it to me as a pervasive loneliness. 

Many people cried with a thankful joy when they experienced World Sensorium. They told me this was because the experience gave something back to them that they likened to the sense of well being they had when they were in their place of origin. They discovered that they had been mourning the loss of a chemical relationship.

FN: Why do you think World Sensorium had such a dramatic effect on some people?

Nalls: Olfactory perception is complex and not completely understood yet, however, it is understood that smell mediates emotional behavior. In my judgment, World Sensorium’s effect on people is due to the unique interactions of the olfactory brain’s neural circuitry that determine the affectiveness of an olfactory artwork and the level of significance that the aesthetic experience takes on.

In Olfactory Art, somatosensation equates to the perception of an aesthetic experience, which starts at the receptor level. Each odorant equates to an electrochemical signal felt or experienced. (This is where the perception of “the actual scents of real places” gets to the edge of science.) World Sensorium, like all smells, is consciously perceived in the orbitofrontal cortex area of the brain, which is connected to the cortex, the reasoning area; the amygdala where the emotional connection is made and the behavioral response is activated; and the limbic system, also called the reptilian or primal brain, which is the area of automatic unconscious response. 

Because of the sense of smell’s direct and nearly simultaneous neural connections, humans experience more powerful emotions from the sense of smell than our other senses. Science currently attributes emotional responses to associative psychology, but from what I have observed, it may also be possible that humans are hardwired to smell odors that are important to our survival. People with particularly important natural scent stimuli in their environment or heritage environment appear to be encoded to perceive them. A surprise for me was that people from different parts of the world feel both that they are responding to and can recognize specific odorants in the World Sensorium composition comprised of well over one hundred phytogenic materials. This may be important to the hypothesis that humanity’s sense of smell is made up of groups of people sharing different receptor families.

Portrait of Gayil Nalls by Joyce Tenneson

FN: Have you always been interested in smell or was this a creative singularity? 

Nalls: I have always been interested in scent and the shades of it that we perceive or don’t perceive and what that means. As a child I was very aware of how atmospheric conditions affected my ability to perceive nature through my sense of smell, especially when heat and evaporating water were involved. Following scent trails was a big part of my play. Early on, I remember being very aware of how smells make me feel.

Smell has been critical to my artistic practice for the last twenty years. In addition to World Sensorium, which is a work that will always be in progress, I have created other olfactory artworks, experiences, and olfactory sculptures based on information systems I create that reveal a truth or meaning. It’s about asking the right questions.

FN: What other olfactory artworks have you done? 

Nalls: In 1998, I created the installation One Billion, Four Hundred Ninety-Five Million, Eight Hundred Fifty-Two Thousand, Twenty-Four (1,495,852,024) at Steffany Martz Gallery in Chelsea. The number represents the total population in the year 2000 of China, Pakistan, Algeria, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Paraguay, Macau, and Djibouti, the countries for which jasmine is their most culturally significant scent. In the installation, the jasmine composition (formulated on the population percentages of the countries) of different species of jasmine was disseminated into the gallery space. 

Also filling the space was my sound art piece of breathing in a 7:1 pattern, entitled Breath, Essence, and (After)image, at a barely perceptible level. The auditory pattern enhanced the sensory awareness, serving as a cue to convey the message of experiencing an artwork through inhaling: that is, indexing the scent through the sound of breathing.

FN: Have you pursued the links between smell and the other senses?

Nalls: In the exhibition Synaesthesia at Siggraph Gallery held in Los Angeles in 2004, I was told I had created the Gallery’s first olfactory experience. I was working with a group called Plays Well With Others and we all created works for the OmniGlobe, a spherical projection system. In my work, a film projection titled Hemispheres, I created an olfactory immersion environment around the globe. It was a eureka moment for me because I was able to successfully bring together film, sculpture and scent. 

I think everyone has synaesthesia and like the acuity of sight, hearing, smell or intelligence, it varies with each person. Humans are hard-wired to continually obtain multiple sense impressions of the world. Without this, I couldn’t be making multi- and inter-disciplinary art. I just think that for most people, the cross communication between the senses is unconscious and for others nearly so, or greater. It’s all about the wiring. Just like you can have a supertaster or a nose, you can have a synesthete.

Based on art history and creators I have known, I think artists cultivate and refine a process, which for some, could be defined as a type of synaesthesia.

FN: Does technology ever play a role in your work? 

Nalls: At Siggraph in 2004 I exhibited The Element Olfactory Works: Fire, Air, Earth & Water. The works were featured with the Morie Blue Tooth Scent Collar, a device originally created for virtual reality. The scents were released individually by remote signal as the model who wore it walked and posed on the runway during the Third Annual Cyber Fashion Show.

FN: Olfactory artwork is still relatively rare and unusual. What kind of response did World Sensorium bring you?

Nalls: Experiencers of World Sensorium celebrate what they harvest in relation to their ability to bring sustained attention to it. The longer people stay with World Sensorium the more they sense its wide-ranging aesthetic experience and true character. It’s a great olfactory ride. For people who have a sustained experience of it, their response is frequently a Gestalt-like one: the experience culminates in a perception of the artwork as unified and harmonic. But ultimately there is no language for the expressive nature and power of the work, nor the knowledge it imparts about our connection with the world.

FN: Are people ready for scented art? Is the art world ready for it? What directions do you see as most promising and least promising?

Nalls: I believe that people want to experience art that makes them feel, think, see and smell, differently. If they understand what it means to smell differently, they’ll think differently. Of course there is still a lot of denial and dismissiveness regarding the sense of smell by people in general, including artists. I have spoken with artists whose artworks were unintentionally very odorous and the odor helped shape the perception of the work, but because it was unintentional, they did not see it as part of the aesthetic of the work. Other artists have used scent to great advantage to convey very important and little understood truths about the human condition. When you ask if the art world is ready for it, I would say yes, but like any new genre, it will take some time before critics and curators have the ability to critique such works in a meaningful way.
 
A number of artists are working with natural smells of the human body and I find the work very insightful in the way it has challenged certain current cultural practices at the urging of commerce. These artists are pulling back the synthetic veil, pulling off the layers of olfactory artifice, to find the smells that allow for the deepest of human connections and delivering them back to us as art. 

The advances in Olfactory Art provide new ideas and expanded understandings of the phenomena of smell beyond the creed of commerce and the limitations of science. 

FN: You’ve told me that the average person is alienated from the sense of smell. What do you mean by that?

Nalls: People, especially urbanites, now navigate their day through a maze of unnatural, artificial and synthetic aroma chemicals, polluting their bodies and coloring their perception of the world. We are on our way to even greater olfactory pretenses that will further undermine and manipulate the human condition. 

The First Nerve Interview: Prof. Donald H. McBurney

[This is the first in what I hope will be an ongoing series of interviews with scientists doing the newest and most intriguing research on smell.]

A while back I wrote about new research on “olfactory comfort,” the phenomenon of people sniffing, or even sleeping with, the worn clothing of a person from whom they are physically separated. The research was led by Donald H. McBurney, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.

I caught up with Prof. McBurney by email and asked him a few questions about his research.

FN: You’ve been interested in wide variety of topics: everything from the taste of chili pepper to the evolutionary aspects of physical attractiveness. How do you characterize yourself as a scientist and psychologist?

DM: I was trained as a sensory psychologist, specializing in the psychophysics of taste and smell. This is a small part of what is considered two of the minor senses, so I have always looked for parallels in other senses. Also, because sensory psychology is among the more biological areas of psychology, I was drawn to evolutionary psychology when it came along. The work on physical attractiveness started when I saw a methodological flaw in some published research, and got an undergraduate student interested in it.

FN: Your interest in the chemical senses began when the field was much less developed than it is today. What first drew you to it?

DM: Pure accident. I was offered a position in Carl Pfaffmann’s lab as a grad student, and got interested in the work.

FN: What specifically got you interested in the science of human body odor?

DM: It is something that is obviously very important to people, based on the effort and money we spend to control it, and the social consequences of body odor. Yet it had received almost no scientific attention. I thought that made it worth attention.

FN: What are the next things we need to find out about olfactory comfort?

DM: We have some unpublished data that suggest interesting relations between olfactory comfort and attachment theory. This would take someone with expertise in both olfaction and personality theory, not a common combination.

FN: What are most important achievements in the field of human olfaction to happen during your career?

DM: I would rather not stick my neck out on that. I do think the progress in understanding the genetics of olfaction has much promise for the future.

FN: What are the biggest current challenges in the study of odor perception?

DM: Control of stimulus at the receptor makes measurement very difficult. In addition, there is a lack of motivation to study odor because it is not as crucial as vision and audition for communication.

FN: How well informed is the public about the current science of smell and taste?

DM: Taste and smell research tends to make the news sometimes because it seems a bit out of the ordinary, as with the work on sniffing T-shirts.

FN: Any other thoughts?

DM: Taste and smell lie at the intersection of many important and interesting areas, such as food intake and health, sexual behavior, and social behavior.